


Counting Down

by VanillaMostly



Category: The Wire
Genre: Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:17:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanillaMostly/pseuds/VanillaMostly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere along the way Randy stops feeling sorry for himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Down

**Author's Note:**

> Season 5 spoilers

 

Somewhere along the way Randy stops feeling sorry for himself, ‘cause if there’s one thing the group home taught him it’s that there are sorry motherfuckers all around. Yeah, so he’s a snitch, and that’s a name which clings to him even with the new school they put him in. The streets forget, times be changing quick here in West Baltimore, but they don’t forget a snitch.

Still, there’s things to hang on to, like Miss Anna’s letters. She sends him one every month from the rehab center out in the county. Randy bets she doesn’t write them herself, burns be hurting too much, but it’s her voice in them, a’ight. Same sort of talk every letter: reminds him to eat well and do his homework and be good. He writes back, makes up all sorts of lies about new friends and basketball teams but there’s one thing he’ll never lie about. He goes to school, and he stays off them corners.

He stays clean too, not just for Miss Anna, but for that one day on the street he sees Dukie buying red tops. Randy fights the hoppers and gets a split lip and a bruised eye, but it changes nothing. At the end of the day Dukie pockets the vials and ducks Randy’s gaze, and he’s gone, that’s that.

He hears word about Michael sometimes. It’s weird to think the nigga in the crazy-ass stories is his old friend, but Randy’s a little proud, nonetheless. He doesn’t ever catch Mike in person though, can only count on the stories to know he’s alive, like with Nay, though from the sound of _that_ Nay’s doing just fine. Hell, he’ll probably go to college, get a law degree and shit.

Randy thinks of them — Miss Anna, Dukie, Michael, Nay — when he’s feeling his weakest, on those hardest days when he’s so sick of it all, wants to just give up, tell the world to fuck it and go somewhere, anywhere.

The reality is he’s got no place to go and no means of going. At least, not yet.

So every morning as he rolls out of bed, and prepares to soldier on the day ahead, he looks out the window and counts in his head, the number of days left till his eighteenth birthday, on a promise to himself that he'll get out of here and go somewhere. Anywhere.

And he always makes good count, Randy.

 


End file.
